Thesis

During my years of study in seminary, I worked at a funeral home. It was the best laboratory in which to learn the Bible and theology. Frequently, I saw dead bodies and attended funerals as I helped direct the families and friends of person after person to a hole in the ground where a once vibrant life would find its final resting place in a cemetery. One night as I was reading through Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, a phone call came from Houston, Texas informing me that an entire family had been killed in an automobile accident.

I remember the shock as I wrote the details of the incident. The bodies of a mother, a six-year-old boy, a four-year-old girl, and two 18-month-old twin boys were on the way to the funeral home where I worked. The father was just about to be told what had happened to his family by the police department. I’ve never forgotten that experience, and I’ve never forgotten what the funeral home parlor looked like when I saw three caskets open containing the lives of five people who died a horrible death.

I was young (23 years old), but I had already experienced death in my own life. By this age, my father, mother, and brother had all died tragically. Two of my uncles had died and one of my cousins was killed when he was five years old. One of my best friends from high school was killed in an automobile accident. I’ve also experienced the death of relationships and the loss of jobs. By the time I was 30, life had become a series of losses that shaped my worldview in ways I once thought impossible.

I wish Matthew McCullough’s book, Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope, was available to me back then. Now, at 50, I am able to better understand all that death has taught me, and this book has been the catalyst for a deepened hope in the promises of God in Jesus Christ. But just what about this book is all that helpful? There are numerous titles about death and dying. The grief industry is a subculture all to itself. What is it about McCullough’s thoughts that are even worth reading in an already crowded space?

Of Losses and Crosses

Observe the modern Evangelical movement, and just beneath the surface, you see a pronounced death-avoidance. Some of the largest churches in the United States are led by pastors who preach the exact opposite of what McCullough writes in this book. Health, wealth, harmony, and prosperity are seemingly the byproducts of an accurate Christian theology. McCullough is aware of that, and he uses a skillful pen to dismantle these thoughts built on such flimsy scaffolding.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a book for the faint of heart. McCullough states the obvious fact that no one really wants to accept: “Death makes a statement about who we are: we are not too important to die,” he writes. “We will die, like all those who’ve gone before us, and the world will keep on moving just as it always has.” He admits when this fact finally penetrates our defenses, it is a “harsh, even terrifying statement.”

The book kindly bludgeons its reader. Yet, it is a mercy. “The truth is that nothing lasts, that you can never go back, and that therefore everyone loses everything to death.” Think about this for more than five minutes and it becomes disorienting. What exactly is the value of my life? This is where McCullough pushes hard.

Death raises questions about where our place actually is. Besides an organic mass that eats, sleeps, reproduces, and decomposes, who am I? What is the value of a life that doesn’t even exist in someone’s memory? The question is this: if my life turns to dust in the end, am I more significant than the stray dog picked apart by buzzards, the goldfish flushed down the toilet, or the cockroach crushed under foot? You still end up dead, just like the animals. In the end, no one resists nature. So, remind me, where do you get this idea that humans matter more than animals do?

The Horrible Truth

McCullough is a pastor in a university city. Holding a Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University, he stands before doctors, lawyers, and aspiring business leaders in the prime of their life every week in a rented school auditorium just off the Vanderbilt campus and teaches them about Jesus and the promises of God. He does this week after week not because he couldn’t do something else (he could), but because reading, thinking, and studying deeply about the Bible’s words has created a crisis of sorts for him that is not unique to him.

The truth is that life works like a savings account in reverse. Zoomed out to the span of an entire life cycle, you see that no one is actually stockpiling anything. You’re spending down, not saving up. Everything you have—your healthy body, your marketable skills, your sharp mind, your treasured possessions, your loving relationships—will one day be everything you’ve lost.

McCullough knows what he is up against. Modern culture lies to modern people. And in order to fully experience joy in this dying life, a new way of thinking must be learned. It is not automatic, and it does not come naturally to human beings—especially to the modern “church” culture that has been taught life is a continuing series of successes and wins. Knowing this, he helps his readers trace their thoughts home to their logical conclusion. By doing so, he helps Christians better know, understand, and apply the promises of God in the future to the problems of the present.

He does this by clearing away cobwebs around areas of the Bible often avoided. Case in point: the changing of the water to wine at the wedding in Cana—John 2. Far too often (if this text is even read or preached) this account in John’s Gospel is not understood for the true “sign” it is. “Packed into what may seem like a little random or offhanded showboating is a concentrated version of everything Jesus came to do,” he writes. This miracle is vitally connected to Isaiah 25 where the promise of God to remove death and its sting forever is clearly promised to the people of God. It is an incident packed full of meaning that points to the promise of Jesus to remove the ultimate experience of loss so that eternal life—both a quantity of life (eternal, never dying) and a quality of life (“a life beyond the reach of death”)—can be experienced by all who trust in him.

Ever the exegete, he is careful to mine the truth of the trajectory of John’s Gospel for his readers. With every turn of the page, McCullough’s readers are led first to the precipice and then to the promise (you really can’t appreciate the power of the latter without realizing the peril of the former). Jesus helps people “understand where his signs are pointing” all the while he is “warning of what blinds” them to his work. Many modern readers will find themselves numbered with the crowd who hurried to Jesus for yet another free meal (see John 6:26). “You’ve seen my power, but missed my point,” McCullough writes in what is surely the best phrase to explain so many modern readers of the Bible.

The Christian hope hinges on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Nothing else will do. No other hope can provide anything other than a growing nihilism. Discontentment, envy, and anxiety are exposed for the frauds they are and how they rob life of its joy because they feed on what dies a little more with each passing day. By admitting the horror of the present life, McCullough reframes grief as he brings forward words from the past into the sorrows of the present so that the promises for the future can comfort and bring true and lasting joy. Moving from honesty to grief to hope is the clarifying process of growth in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. All who walk in this way will find an anchor for their soul even as their body dies.

Douglas E. Baker is Tenth Presbyterian Church’s current Church Administrator, having joined the team in 2018. He enjoys history, theology, and Chick-fil-A. He holds degrees from LSU, Johns Hopkins, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

“The doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, has no practical relevance at all.”

—Immanuel Kant

How great the number of modern Christians who would agree with Kant’s assessment! The Holy Trinity—if mentioned at all—seemingly has no benefit to the modern understanding other than some sort of clever formulation for an orthodoxy of the obscurant. Kelly Kapic, professor of theological studies at Covenant College, is best known for his work with the writings of John Owen. The 1657 publication of Owen’s work, Communion with God, provided a framework whereby Christians would better understand the nature and work of the Trinitarian God and their capacity through grace to speak with and hear from their Creator. Kapic has dedicated much of his academic work to helping the church understand Owen’s work and thereby learn more about the Holy Trinity.

The 2018 re-release of his 2010 book, The God Who Gives: How the Trinity Shapes the Christian Story is best read alongside his 2017 release of Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering. These books form a theological compendium revealing the majesty and power of a God at work in the ruins of what Kapic calls “a magnificent failure.” The failure, however, is not the result of God’s mistake, but of the sin of the human race. One of Kapic’s greatest achievements in these books (and there are many!) is to carefully, but forcefully, state the obvious. For a culture allergic to the idea of sin, he propounds the idea of total depravity as a rupture in relationship with God and others not as a peccadillo, but a complete loss. He laments (a concept important to understand Kapic’s overall theological trajectory) that “we do not think as we ought, feel as we should, will as we might.” Like Owen, Kapic understands that “sin has distorted our judgments, twisted our affections, confused our volitions, and even damaged our physical bodies.”

To even think of God correctly requires assistance from God himself, and Kapic models the correct path forward to explore the simplicity of God. Contrary to so many strange ideas about God, Kapic returns to the book of Genesis for the formation of Christian doctrine that is not contingent on human analogies for its foundation. To be sure, to even think thoughts of God requires some reordering of the modern mind because human beings are taught to think of God in the image of John Locke (1632–1704). Kapic unearths the invisible forces bordering modern thought when he quotes John Locke’s famous phrase, “every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself.” While this might be good political theory for the establishment of a statecraft free from the tyranny and exploitation of an unjust state power, theologically, it is dangerous.

Origin of the Species

Human beings are creatures, not creators. As such, their existence is owed to the purpose of God as understood in the actions of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Kapic underscores the actions of the Holy Trinity as an established order over the created earth and places human beings as the regents of the reign of God. Rightly does he feature Genesis 1–3 as the centerpiece and “story of Israel in a nutshell.” Here in the first chapters of the Bible are the “foundational narratives of God’s spectacular gift of creation and the rebellion of his royal representatives.” Between Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 3:15, the beginning of the world is described as well as the heightened anticipation of “the end of all things.”

Even as humanity is plunged into sin and exiled from the Garden of Eden into the wilderness of a world of sin, Kapic is quick to highlight that “God has never given up his original design for creation.” The “progress of God’s kingdom” is seen through the lives of those humans born after Adam in the establishment of covenants with key figures that advance the kingdom of God on earth.

These covenants serve as anchors for a divine plotline culminating in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Throughout the biblical narrative, however, he is quick to point out “this progress was not made without pain and suffering.” So very often, “the advancement of God’s purposes takes place in the context of extreme adversity” as seen most clearly in the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt. It was in this harsh environment of injustice and pain that God worked an exodus through Moses that remains the picture of the redemption provided for God’s children through Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension.

Emotions, Suffering, and the Holy Spirit

Kapic’s theology of suffering is best seen as a pastoral companion to the doctrinal foundations of realism seen throughout the Bible. He isn’t afraid to speak of the terror of sickness, sorrow, and loneliness because he isn’t shy about speaking of the Holy Spirit. Seizing on the puzzling aspect of the departure of Jesus from the world as a something good for the apostles and the world (see John 16:7), Kapic shows how God gives himself to the world even as Jesus is absent from it through the person of the Holy Spirit.

When God gives, he gives nothing short of himself. As the one who alone is called the “gift of God” (John 4:10; Acts 2:38, 8:20; 10:45, 11:17; Ephesians 4:7; Hebrews 6:4), the Spirit is given by all three persons of the Trinity, not only proceeding to us from the Father and the Son (John 14:26, 15:26, 16:7), but also freely giving himself and distributing his gifts as he wills (Hebrews 2:4). When the Father gave the Son, this was not his final gift. In his triune generosity, God continues to give in ways that his disciples could not have asked or imagined. Encountering the resurrected Jesus confirmed the reality of God’s presence with the disciples through the Son. Receiving the “gift of God” meant the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the triune God—now abides within all who believe. By the Spirit, God gives himself in such a way that he is not only with us, but in us.

Kapic is at his best when he shows how misunderstood and misapplied “familiar” texts of Holy Scripture are misconstrued in the life of the church. From John 3:16 to Matthew 6:33 to the central message of the gospel found in the initial preaching of John the Baptist (Matthew 3:2), the message of Pentecost after the gift of the Spirit is repentance and faith. What true repentance means, however, is critically linked to the person and work of Jesus who “had come in obscure humility, had lived in faithful constancy, and was crucified in shameful poverty.” It was this Jesus who was raised in power to give the gift of repentance and faith as “a kind of disorientation and reorientation that simultaneously shakes up and revitalizes every area” of life by the power of the Spirit. The righteousness of Jesus Christ is now consistently carried forward in and by the life of a follower of Jesus who lives for the good of one’s neighbor and works for the advantage of others by disadvantaging themselves in obedience to Christ.

What the Bible calls “sanctification” (or becoming more holy or more like Christ) doesn’t happen easily, and it doesn’t happen apart from great struggle and sorrow. The world in all its harshness beats down on a Christian in ways that often increases the pain of life to such a point that “hard thoughts” of God (to employ the words of John Owen) become the norm for those who suffer. Such thoughts “reveal broader problems” in the “thinking and attitude” of Christians that must be addressed. Rather than run from them or avoid the subject all together, Kapic’s pastoral counsel is to “dig in and rebuild” areas of doctrine that seem unbelievable when facing sickness and sorrow.

More Plato Than Jesus

Many prevailing beliefs about the body and the physical world are overturned as he exposes the fault lines in modern theology that are not correct. With a deft hand, he shows “how the Enlightenment tended to elevate the mind over physicality” and viewed “the body with deep suspicion.” In essence: “the body existed solely for the mind.” More Christians are influenced by Plato than Jesus, and Kapic is quick to point out that when encountering pain, the “strangeness of God” is best understood in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The way that God takes responsibility for our condition is by becoming one of us. The Son’s incarnation, suffering unto death, and bodily resurrection are God’s answer. In these three movements, God takes possession of our sin, misery and battle with suffering. This reality refutes any conception of a distant and unconcerned deity, for God enters our world to hand the cosmic crisis.

Kapic is a theologian of pastoral concern who desires that love be the impetus for action in the context of the church of Christ. Doctrinal foundations are essential to withstand the shock of pain, but Christians are to use doctrinal formulations to “develop both pastoral sensitivity and theological instincts.” For Kapic, “doing theology is more often like farming than it is like stacking doctrinal bricks.” Lament by the people of God—for themselves and others—is the hallmark of what it means to be a person of true faith as they experience the pain in waiting for the coming inheritance promised to them. To be able to use the Bible as that which gives voice “with which to pray to God” as well as to “hear God’s voice to his people” through Scripture’s words is made possible by the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Theology, done rightly, results in love for God and one another. This distinguishing mark of the Christian is the path of peace found when doctrine and devotion join forces to build faith in the written promises of God. For Kapic, the promises of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit are linked to the people of God because death itself cannot separate them from him who died and rose again for his people. And this is the embodied hope of the God who gives.

Douglas E. Baker is Tenth Presbyterian Church’s current Church Administrator, having joined the team in 2018. He enjoys history, theology, and Chick-fil-A. He holds degrees from LSU, Johns Hopkins, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.—Isaac Watts

Jesus entered the world during a time of violence and terror as the wails of mothers whose children were murdered for political expediency surely still echoed across the nation. Government oppression and taxation bore down on those whose incomes were least able to sustain yet another power grab for money. The world seemed to teeter on the brink of war as political kingdoms were rising up against each other in ways that threatened to destroy any semblance of civilization and order.

Yet, tucked safely away in the seclusion of a stable, the cry of a newborn caused the invisible world to break into the visible; eternity stepped into time and brought with it a blend of the ordinary and supernatural in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. Mary’s body, though supernaturally impregnated, experienced the normal pains of childbirth as the infant Jesus came into the world. It was not that Jesus was simply born (as he had no beginning). Rather, he took on flesh and became man (John 1:1-10; Philippians 2:1-10). In that stable rested the only one able to live perfectly and thus die as the divine substitute for all those who would be saved by his life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

Jesus’ appearance on this planet was nothing short of an act of war against Satan and his demonic legions. Without ambiguity, the Bible reveals that Jesus Christ lived as the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45) and accomplished in obedience to his Father what no other human being could have ever done. Jesus’ sinless life was the foundation for his crucifixion as the person of Jesus Christ made possible the divine work of Jesus as he bore in his body the sins of his people (1 Peter 2:24). Though John’s Gospel does not present the birth narratives of Jesus, the apostle John understands precisely the purpose of the Incarnation: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). And destroy them he did!

The immediate aftermath of the death of Jesus resulted in people coming out of their graves and going into the city (Matthew 27:53). The vice grip of death had been broken and salvation had been accomplished. Bethlehem’s manger was but the first earthly experience of a man who would be known as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). His life would be known for his death as he would rise to fulfill the purpose of his birth—salvation for Adam’s ruined race.

The incarnation of Jesus reaches far as the curse of sin is found. The destruction of Satan’s work has already begun and will soon see its fulfillment as the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Douglas E. Baker is Tenth Presbyterian Church’s current Church Administrator, having joined the team in 2018. He enjoys history, theology, and Chick-fil-A. He holds degrees from LSU, Johns Hopkins, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

This world is full of sorrow because it is full of sin. It is a dark place. It is a lonely place. It is a disappointing place. The brightest sunbeam in it is a friend. Friendship halves our troubles and doubles our joys. — J.C. Ryle

As I watched people pass the casket to look upon the lifeless body of a young man who died of a drug overdose, I realized the community of drug addicts is often stronger in support and love than the community of the Christian church. Those suffering from drug addiction often support one another more intentionally than do the people of God. To be sure, sin lies at the bottom of coping responses that do not seek to find solace and comfort in the gospel, but the world in all its sinful manifestations often creates a community where the common experience of sin and its effects seem to be stronger than the grace of God in Christ. Surely, something is wrong.

A recent scientific survey revealed that nearly half of Americans feel alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent). One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them. Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent). The problem is so bad in the United Kingdom that Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a government post with the title, “Minister for Loneliness.”

Drew Hunter’s new book, Made for Friendship, is a book every Christian should read. Warning: It is hard to read, because as you do, you will soon realize just how few friends are truly in your life. This book is an enticement, of sorts. From the very outset it pulls no punches. The world in all its cruelty actually produces and promotes isolation and loneliness. Sin does that. It forces a person to deceive others as they commit acts that result in the exact opposite of what they really want—friendship.

This book lands at a time in the cultural landscape where individualism is the hallmark of personhood. To be strong is to be independent, a loner, a self-made man or woman. The problem? It isn’t true. Hunter’s book is the antidote to such lies. Hunter is a student of history, and he opens the book by presenting various theologians and their friends. The stalwarts of theological precision and preaching were, at bottom, great friends.

John Newton: “I think to a feeling mind there is no temporal pleasure equal to the pleasure of friendship.” John Calvin: “I think that there has never been, in ordinary life, a circle of friends so sincerely bound to each other as we have been in our ministry.” Jonathan Edwards: “Friendship is the highest happiness of all moral agents.” Augustine: “Two things are essential in this world—life and friendship. Both must be prized highly, and not undervalued.”

Friendship Fallacies
Friendship is one of the true necessities of life, Hunter maintains. Without it, life atrophies and can become “unraveled emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.” The ache for deep friendship is not something that is a result of the Fall. In some circles, it might seem fashionable to present friendship as a crutch that is given to fallen human beings by God in their struggle with sin as if the longing for friendship were, in some sense, a by-product of the Fall.

Hunter provides excellent exegetical work to sustain the point that Adam was lonely “before sin enters the world.” He correctly stipulates, “The first problem in human history, the first problem on the pages of Scripture, the first problem in any human life, was not sin—it was solitude.” Adam’s aloneness, therefore, was not “a result of his fallenness.” This is an “Edenic ache” that we all experience, and it is not solved by an exclusive relationship with God himself or by marriage. “Friendship is indispensable” because “God is a God of friendship.”

Lest you think the book is mere fodder for the romantics among us, Hunter dispels such notions. “Friendship is an affectionate bond forged between two people as they journey through life with openness and trust,” Hunter writes. Such “openness and trust,” however, isn’t for the faint of heart. Friendship is work.

Surely, we have all experienced supposed “friends” who were users or abusers in ways that made accountability a word to be avoided. “Friends” who all too quickly quote Proverbs 27:17 (Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another) as their “life verse” might best be avoided. Hunter does a masterful job of deconstructing bad hermeneutics and by doing so demolishes accountability groups and/or “friendships” (particularly among men these days) where one person constantly feels attacked and provoked to anger. “A sharp tongue speaks words like sword thrusts,” Hunter writes. He isn’t glib about the radical change in perspective that must come in order for a person to become a good friend:

Our hearts default to a posture of self-focus. I instinctively place myself at the center of my relationships. I tend to think about how often others have wronged me—how they have been inconsiderate, have expressed anger, or have gossiped about me. If we mainly think about the weeds that others need to uproot, and not our own, our relationships won’t flourish. Because this very impulse—this tendency to think about how they have failed us, rather than how we have failed them—is self-centered, and it will produce weeds. In order to cultivate true friendship, then, we must cultivate a posture of repentance.

The Faithful Friend
Thankfully, he doesn’t leave us to ourselves in order to find the true model of friendship. For this he points to the greatest friend—Jesus himself. Scene by scene, Hunter unfolds the beauty of Christ in all his fullness of friendship to those least deserving of it. The Lord Jesus Christ is patient when wronged, does not return evil for evil, willingly offers his life in the place of sinners, and commits to them an unwavering friendship through every trial of life. There is no friend like Jesus, and Hunter is at his best when pointing to the Christ of God.

The grief of friendship? Losing them. Not necessarily through betrayal or some other sin (though this happens quite often!), but through distance and finally, death. The mobility of our modern society can rip friendships apart in ways that cause severe grief. Just ask the wife who moved because of her husband’s job far away from her friends. Ask the man whose best friend was forced to re-locate away from his church. Ask the high school student who just waved goodbye to his best friend as the moving truck pulls out of the driveway.

Yet, death is ultimately the final enemy of friendship. It stalks all our relationships with the incessant whisper that the friend we love will soon be gone. Time is fleeting, and life is a vapor. Here again, Hunter provides the biblical theology of friendship that sustains weary ones with a word of encouragement. Friendships in the Lord Jesus Christ never end.

Many people think that eternal life will be boring. But think about your most joyful moments with friends. Now take that joy, multiply it by ten thousand, and project it into your eternal future. The whole of that happiness merely gestures in the direction of the joys to come. History ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with the laugher of friends.

The hope of any author is that their book might live beyond their own circle of friends. For Hunter, this book accomplishes that goal because, in the end, the friend of whom he speaks, lives beyond his written words and points to the eternal Word—the Lord Jesus Christ, the friend of sinners.

Douglas E. Baker is Tenth Presbyterian Church’s current Church Administrator, having joined the team in 2018. He enjoys history, theology, and Chick-fil-A. He holds degrees from LSU, Johns Hopkins, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Renewed determination by discouraged preachers and commitments by laypeople to honor the preaching of the word were among the fruit of a preaching conference in the Philippines this fall sponsored by BibleMesh.

Organized by BibleMesh Institute student Joshua Gurango and two other ministers in Metro Manila, the October 27 “Theology of Preaching” conference featured sessions on preaching and listening to preaching, as well as an open discussion on theology and local church ministry. The conference built on the success of a BibleMesh-sponsored conference in the Philippines last year on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

“There is a wonderful resurgence of expository preaching in conservative churches here in Manila,” Gurango said. “One of the reasons why we came up with this conference specifically though was that we believed it’s not just the preachers that need to know what biblical preaching is. The people in the pew need to know what biblical preaching is all about as well.”

The conference, cosponsored by Metro Manila’s Pilgrim Community Church, also included giveaways of BibleMesh discipleship resources and a dinner for preachers at which Gurango explained how to use BibleMesh courses in a local church discipleship program. Gurango is head of pastoral care for the Eastwood satellite of Christ’s Commission Fellowship (CCF) – a Philippines-based nondenominational church with 60 satellites worldwide – and is about to launch CCF Eastwood’s third cohort of adult students through a series of BibleMesh courses that cover biblical and systematic theology, church history, and apologetics.

The preaching conference, attended by about 200 people, including approximately 50 preachers, was held in a local municipal auditorium and featured three plenary addresses by the conference organizers:

— Pastor Ramen Caliwag of Scripture Alone Baptist Church addressed “the urgent need for preaching.” Drawing from 2 Timothy 3-4, he said preaching is “a serious command of God” necessitated by the “serious condition of the people.”

“Instead of succumbing to the pressure of anti-preaching culture,” Caliwag said, “be a diligent, but patient reformer.”

— Pastor James Chu of Pilgrim Community Church addressed “Christ-centered preaching,” which he defined as “preaching that is shaped by the wisdom of Christ, seeks conformity of all peoples to Christ, and [is] energized by the power of Christ.”

— Gurango addressed how to listen to sermons, an act he called “expository listening.”

“Expository listening,” Gurango said, “seeks to understand the written Word for all of life, in order to witness the glory of the incarnate Word in all of life.”

Following the three plenary addresses, a “table talk” discussion with the three speakers dealt with “the life of the local church.” The discussion reminded believers that “rejecting the means of grace,” including preaching, is “rejecting the grace of the means,” Gurango said.

Among results of the conference, one attendee said he “realized not being attentive to the preaching of [his] pastor ultimately revealed … indifference toward Christ and His Word and the grace He is extending,” Gurango said. Other attendees said the conference encouraged them to keep preaching faithfully in their churches rather than seeking new places to minister. Several conference goers said the event confirmed their calls to ministry.

“The Theology of Preaching conference made me realize the reality of God speaking to His people through His appointed minister,” said Jama Javier, a youth ministry leader at CCF Eastwood. “Biblical preaching cuts through the fog of today’s culture and corrects the distorted vision of some modern ideas. I came to realize that true preaching brings the listener back to the time the Word was written and guides them through modern application. True preaching is God’s means of proclaiming His will, ways, and promises to His pilgrim people.”

HAMILTON, Bermuda, Nov. 16, 2018 – Today, BibleMesh and Third Millennium Ministries launched a new partnership with graduate-level courses that are fully transferable to BibleMesh partner schools. This agreement establishes a pathway for English-speaking students across the world to access an innovative, orthodox, evangelical curriculum that provides personalized learning to equip future ministry leaders at an affordable price.

The BibleMesh Institute (BMI) will provide on-line courses that can be accessed by students anywhere at any time. These courses are designed to help prepare students for Christian ministry around the world. BibleMesh’s state-of-the-art technology enables churches and other ministries to participate in an online global ministry network.

“Third Millennium is excited to provide our courses in partnership with BibleMesh because of the quality of the technology that makes the student’s learning experience second to none,” stated Dr. Richard Pratt Jr., President of Third Millennium Ministries. “BibleMesh provides learning tools and faculty oversight that facilitates a personalized learning environment in which students can engage our innovative, graphics-driven curriculum for graduate-level academic credit at an affordable price,” stated Dr. Gregory Perry, Third Millennium’s Vice President for Strategic Projects.

“BibleMesh is honored to join Third Millennium in their core belief that every Christian deserves a well-trained pastor. We are grateful for the opportunity to stand in solidarity with churches around the world to provide trusted theological education.” stated Dr. Benjamin Quinn, BibleMesh’s Academic Director.

About Third Millennium Ministries
Third Millennium’s mission is to equip Christian leaders by designing, creating, and distributing a biblical, theologically sound, multimedia seminary curriculum in every language and every land across multiple platforms. Because Third Millennium believes every Christian deserves a well-trained pastor, we provide biblical education for free in informal learning environments across the world, and affordably to students who seek academic credit under faculty oversight in formal learning institutions.

About BibleMesh
BibleMesh works with churches, ministries, and institutions to provide affordable global trusted theological education. Accredited degree pathways and certificate tracks are available through the BibleMesh Institute. BibleMesh incorporates advanced technology to enhance student assessment, memory and learning.

Media enquiries should be directed to Douglas Baker at douglas.baker@biblemesh.com or +1 405.443.1157.